The good old days of DD ads

Yesterday I saw one TV ad and was completely smitten by it. Not because the ad was very creative but it took me onto a different trip altogether, the good old days of advertising. As a kid we had that B&W Television set of ‘Uptron’ brand (see you never forget the first things in your life). It was huge, bulky and came with the traditional shutter with the lock and key. My mother used to lock it when she did not want us (me and my brothers) to watch TV (especially during exam time and nobody dared to search or ask for the keys). We used to watch The Jungle Book, Alice in Wonderland, Duck Tales, and Tom & Jerry, Chhayageet and Chitrahaar and…. If by any chance we forgot to switch the idiot box ON, our neighbors TV volume ensured we don’t miss one.

My first rendezvous with the advertisements started at that time though not at all from critical or analytical perspective. Those were the years when we (or to be more precise I) hated those ad breaks in the midst of an interesting program. But TV set sans cable connection enforced ads onto you. Therefore I still remember those ads of Natraj pencil, Cadbury, Lehar Pepsi, Surf (the Lalitaji fame), Lijjat papad, Dabur Hajmola, Bajaj Brahmi Amla Hair oil, Rin Supreme and the list goes on…

And the slogans and jingles which still hum in the back of my mind…Kya swad hai zindgi mein, Vicks ki goli lo kheech kheech dur karo, Buland bharat ki buland tasvir, I love you Rasna, Doodh si safedi Nirma se aayi, and yes how I can I forget the very famous Vicco turmeric nahi cosmetic…Rajkumar Hirani in Fevicol ka majboot jod hai to Deepika Chikhalia’s daam phir bhi kam...

Coming back to the reason why I finally decided to start this blog is the TVC which I had mentioned earlier. It’s the Rotomac pen ad. Writing about the product, the corporation behind it is multi-million dollar turnover company Vikram Kothari Enterprises which launched Rotomac in the year 1992. V.K. Enterprises are not the pioneer in the pen industry.

Let me take you to the brief history of the brand. G. M. Pens International exclusive licensee of Reynolds (originally from France) commenced its India operations in 1986 and pioneered the writing revolution in India (at least from the marketing perspective). G.M. is probably the first company to build a pen as a brand, a product which acted like a commodity market before Reynolds. To beat the monopoly created by Reynolds as a leading brand, Rotomac launched its pen range and positioned itself in the same target audience. I still remember Raveena Tondon endorsing Rotomac with the tagline likhte likhte love ho jaaye (literary meaning fall in love when writing with it) followed by Javed Akhter endorsing their Fighter pen range (kyunki fighter hamesha jeetata hai).

In the past few years Rotomac’s TV presence almost drooped, only to emerge in its new avatar now in their recent TVC. Rotomac changed it’s tagline from likhte likhte love ho jaaye TO likh ke faad denge (literary meaning to tear apart when you write). Over the past two decades Rotomac has positioned itself from a soft feminine brand image to a more masculine one. Do you agree?

….to be continued.